Goebbels believed that "horseplay is necessary." At a showing of a film adaptation of the pacifist novel "Im Westen nichts Neues" ("All Quiet on the Western Front") on Dec. 5, 1930, at the Mozartsaal cinema on Berlin's Nollendorfplatz, members of the SA released white mice into the audience. Screaming women caused the film to be interrupted while SA men roared with laughter. Goebbels himself was sitting in the audience.

He justified his strategy of provocation by saying that the Nazis could be accused of many things, but certainly not of being dull. Street battles and brawls at political meetings forged a sense of unity and camaraderie among party members in Berlin.

Goebbels wanted Hitler's party to show its colors in Berlin, which he described as "the reddest city in Europe besides Moscow." Together, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) captured 52.2 percent of the vote in the 1925 municipal elections. Berlin's new Nazi leader decided to combat the left's superiority in numbers with a frontal attack.

He went to the Pharussäle, a meeting hall often used by the KPD for its mass rallies in Berlin's Wedding district, and gave a speech on the subject of "The Collapse of the Bourgeois Class State." This provoked the communists.

On Feb. 11, 1927, the Nazi Party meeting turned into a violent brawl between the two groups. Beer glasses, chairs and tables flew through the hall, and severely injured people were left lying covered with blood on the floor. Despite the injuries, it was a triumph for Goebbels, whose thugs beat up about 200 communists and drove them from the hall.